In a conventional fruit weighing and sorting machine, it is provided on a machine bed thereof with a plurality of pans to carry the fruit to be sorted by weight and a weighing device for measuring the weight of fruit on the pans. When the fruit on a pan is heavier than a set value of the weighing device, the weighing device shall tilt and thereby decline the pan, allowing the fruit on the pan to be dumped out of the pan and be collected. In other words, the weighing device and the fruit pans in the conventional fruit weighing and sorting machine must tilt almost at the same time to sort out fruit having a certain predetermined weight. To this purpose, the machine has rather complicated structure and requires longer time for sorting. Another disadvantage of such conventional fruit weighing and sorting machine is that the tilted pan shall apply a considerable force on the weighing device and thereby, adversely affects the accuracy of the weighing device. Moreover, since the fruit to be sorted are not completely the same in their shape and might sometimes stay in the pans even after the latter have been tilted to a certain degree. To ensure the dumping of fruit from the pans, the pans must be tilted to have a larger inclination. Since the pans are disposed at an outer side of the machine chain, it is necessary to increase the width of the machine to tilt the pans further. Meanwhile, the sorting speed is reduced due to the further tilting of the pans.
Furthermore, the conventional fruit weighing and sorting machine is constructed by employing the lever principle and therefore, must be adjusted to find out each and every balance center of the pans lest the accuracy of the sorting machine should be adversely affected. This adjustment is of course time- and labor-consuming.
It is therefore desirable to develop a different fruit weighing and sorting machine which has fruit hoppers with an improved opening mechanism to eliminate drawbacks existing in the fruit pans of the conventional fruit weighing and sorting machine.